Adults

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  ‘Why are all your analogies about phones?’

  ‘Oh for god’s sake.’

  ‘You need to be a lot clearer on this if you want me to understand, Jenny.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know 100 per cent whether I want one, but I want to keep the possibility open.’ I feel rushed and limited and very mortal. I said: ‘Do YOU feel that you’ve interrogated things fully?’

  He looked frantic, then. ‘Don’t pin me down on this!’

  ‘You’re the one pinning me down, asking impossible questions about resentment! I’m not a fortune-teller!’ I’m a fortune-teller’s daughter.

  He nodded and looked out over the street at the man in his kitchen. He was still making a cup of tea. For all I knew, Art had been having similar fantasies about him. And then Art said: ‘I just don’t want us to get to our fifties and you be resenting me. That’s all.’

  ‘I promise you I won’t let it get to that.’

  ‘But how do you know, if you’re not a fortune-teller?’

  ‘Maybe I have a little of it in my DNA.’

  Art looked at me and said, with a horrible gentleness: ‘I don’t want this to become a point of self-torture, because neither of us have time for that.’

  ‘Oh, I always make time for self-torture.’

  MY MOTHER

  and I walk towards the gallery. She takes my hand and I let her.

  ‘You’re not off the hook, by the way, about binning my school files.’

  ‘You really should have said if they were so important.’

  And then I see the milling crowd through the glass windows. I tell myself to be strong. To walk tall. That’s it. Hold yourself together. Walk like a man. I am Ripley in the lift with the flame-thrower. I can do this.

  We step into the spacious gallery. I always hated galleries and could never tell Art, but they give me an instant migraine, like shopping malls and churches. It’s the pressure of a building with intent. My mother takes two glasses of wine off a tray and hands me one. I drink half of it. I can feel the gin inside me, looking for a friend. It finds the wine. They hit it off. My head is a party. I look around at all the people and for a second I am happily lost – and then I feel the darkness of their clothes and the situation. It is inevitable I will see Art – the one my soul dreads and seeks (there’s always one at any given time) – any second, even if I try to talk to my mother, even if I pretend to smile at a stranger, even if I look for the bar or the toilet when I do not want the bar or the toilet or maybe I do want the toilet, even if—

  Now. Look. There.

  STILL

  LIFE

  I take him in – hunched and shaven-headed, the warlock he always was. And, next to him: her. Perched on a stool, pinching the stem of a glass of red, she is like a buzzard in a distant tree – elegant, solid, rare, doubted-at-first, and then: THERE.

  She is smaller than she looks on my phone.

  I take a moment, on my own, bent over with my hands on the top of my knees. I breathe deeply. A few yogic lion breaths.

  My mother says, ‘There’s Art!’

  I stand up. Straighten myself.

  ‘Where? Oh, yes. There he is.’

  ‘Let’s go over.’

  Art jumps up as we approach. ‘Hello! Gosh, I didn’t think you’d come! It’s so great that you’ve come!’

  We should not have come. I look down at the floor. Then I realise I do not want Suzy seeing me looking at the floor in case she reads too much into it, so I look at her. Except I cannot look at her. Especially not when she is looking at me so … vibrantly. I look down again.

  ‘Your hair!’ says Art. ‘It looks great.’

  ‘It does not.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ says my mother. ‘Well, look at this!’

  Art says: ‘Jenny, Carmen, Suzanne. Suzanne, Carmen, Jenny.’

  My mother is straight in there with the double kisses. I look at Suzy.

  Art says: ‘Suzanne has been dying to meet you.’

  Suzy says: ‘He talks about you all the time.’

  She says this, to me, to my face, in real life. I realise I have never heard her speak. Her voice is soft and sonorous and all the things my voice is not. Reality is so discourteous, don’t you think? I have a sudden wild fantasy where Suzy takes me by the hand and we run towards the river, laughing, everyone watching – who are they, these mystical nymphs? – and we strip and jump and swim naked together in the cold but refreshing water. We start to swim away to a far, foreign land.

  Art says: ‘Carmen! So glad you could make it too. It has been too long.’ He looks at my mother meaningfully but then I don’t know whether I am just trapped in a maze of meaning right now. Everything is so maxed out with meaning.

  Suzy says: ‘Art tells me you’re a journalist. How exciting.’

  I am not prepared for this interview. I say: ‘More of a columnist, really.’ She nods. The air around us bristles. ‘So,’ I say, ‘what is it you do?’ The question catches in my throat.

  She smiles, looks down, modest. ‘Bits and bobs. Art said you follow one of my accounts on Instagram. That’s kind of you.’

  ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘On there? Suzy Brambles.’

  I look as though I am trying to place it. Suzy … Brambles, you say? B-R-A … ‘Oh, yes, I think I do know you on there!’

  ‘Yes,’ she grins. I grin.

  It is all so superlatively congenial. The tension is at critical mass.

  I say, ‘I think you might have followed me, too. Until recently.’

  ‘Did I?’ Her brow buckles, almost convincingly. She is choosing to play this game, and I must play along. I decide that maybe I can turn this whole situation around – from extreme discomfort to blissful solace – when I convince her to start following me again. In fact, I will not leave this place until it is so. I relax a little. In a way, it’s what I’ve wanted for so long: An Audience with Suzy Brambles.

  I say: ‘What kind of bits and bobs do you do?’

  ‘Arty things, mostly. Also I teach French to underprivileged children.’

  French. My only B at A-level. Now I do know, categorically, that France has always had it in for me. I wonder if she speaks Frenchly to Art when they’re—

  ‘You’ve travelled a lot, then?’ my mother says.

  ‘Not as much as I’d like.’

  ‘Are you from London?’ I ask.

  ‘Suzanne could not be more London,’ says Art. ‘We just spent the weekend at one of her mother’s places, in Belgravia.’

  Places. I want to whistle. My mother does.

  ‘And I understand you’re from Lancashire?’ Suzy says.

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘I’m still there!’ my mother says. ‘I’m just down visiting and helpin’ out.’

  Helpin’ out! Dear Christ. Like she is some hokey Texan mom.

  I look at Art’s arm. His tattoos.

  His skin.

  WE’D GONE

  out for drinks, to talk. It pained me, but I also felt sort of exhilarated by my own proximity to emotional danger. Like I was prodding my own parameters. I was wearing a different perfume to seem altered and unfamiliar. I’d replaced most of my clothes and perfumes anyway, after.

  As the night wore on, we moved outside to smoke more thoroughly. We graduated from small to large wines. Whisky chasers. I was shitfaced, spectacularly. Adrenaline held me together, kept me upright, kept me talking. We discussed another exhibition he had been offered. His ideas. His travel plans. Then it came to peeling-off time and neither of us wanted to go. So, one look led to another, we fumbled through the apportioning of suggestion, of potential blame and power, and, subliminally, via an off-licence and a taxi, he ended up back at our old house. He went straight in. I took a deep breath and followed.

  I saw him looking around the lounge. There was our plant, ‘Robert’. The record player. The TV. Everything, still existing, without him, so blasé. There was the sofa with the waxy patch on the back where his head sweat
ed when he played video games. I looked at it and felt like I could be forever fond of it, which felt somehow magnanimous. Everything seemed to hum in his direction. Hi hi hi, hi hi. I thought of Nick Cave’s ‘objects and their fields’ – everything with its own shape and potential. Everything with its magnetic history. There were – literal – gaps where he’d been: spaces on the walls that had once held his photos. I saw Art looking at those spaces, and I felt like I understood. This was his dream, and my dream, somehow; our narcissistic ideal: to be adored with zero pressure. To leave a gaping hole in which we could be loved.

  Art said, ‘You’ve hardly looked at your phone all night. Impressive.’

  I’d wanted to. I’d been dying to get a surreptitious shot of us both together and post it, to prove we were still friends. But it felt too jarring. Too slapdash. I had a point to prove that was bigger than my reputation, even. The point was: my body can still kill you. He’d walked away, I pulled him back. Through fucking him, I could use his body to leave my body. The chastity I had been preserving had been waiting for this moment. I surveyed the size and shape of him and I thought, Why do you get to walk around like a free agent? We’ll see about that. The stage was set.

  Rekindling an old romance, even for a few hours, is a byzantine affair. I’d almost kissed him in the cab, but was enjoying the tension too much: that small window of time when you know that it is on, that it is indubitable, but there’s also a slim chance the world or the vehicle could blow up in the meantime. It’s the Christmas Eve of hooking up.

  In the lounge, Art sat down. And very nearly put me off.

  ‘I know this must be very strange for you, me being back here.’

  ‘Strange for me?’

  ‘I know it must be harder for you, out there. You’re such a catch, though, Jenny.’

  Reader, I fucked him anyway.

  I straddled him on the sofa – clumsy at first and then all-encompassing. He hadn’t shaved in days and the stubble was invigorating. I knew exactly how to put my lips on his lips, precisely how to put my tongue into his mouth. He stiffened.

  He had lost weight. There were nubs where no nubs had been previously. There were juts and corners. I kissed them all. I reacquainted myself with his penis. I took my time. I didn’t want him to go down on me because it made him feel too far away.

  He fell asleep in my arms, in our old bed, that too-big bed that had been too big before he moved out. I felt him take his penultimate pre-slumber breath, a big hard deep one, and then relax on the outbreath – a huge sigh, like a child does after they’ve been sobbing.

  I lay awake, listening to him breathing.

  We woke up the same way. ‘Babes in the wood,’ I said, and he laughed, and his breath was foul, and I didn’t care. It was his old foul breath and it would be coming out of him until the wrinkles on his face sank into trenches and I would breathe it in and out and it would take me closer to the inevitable rushing personal death of myself in a world of unwelcome. Sunlight spilled through the blinds. His toe ticked against my heel. I wondered whether we would have sex again. I wondered whether I should allow myself to want to. I wondered whether I just wanted him to want to. He got up to make coffee.

  As I was sitting on the toilet, I felt around inside the pockets of his jeans, which were on the floor, and found a black kirby grip. I looked at it for a while, thinking about time and how no one is ever anyone’s.

  I got fully dressed because that felt the least presumptuous thing to do. We sat down together at the too-big wooden table in the kitchen. I picked up a teaspoon and stirred my coffee but I didn’t put milk in. I was still harbouring a wild desire to seem different; to seem new. Black coffee was a start.

  He said: ‘So I have a date tonight.’ Then he laughed. ‘It’s sort of depressing, isn’t it? The futility of romance.’

  The clock on the wall ticked. A bird outside chirped. I realised how tightly I was holding my teaspoon. My index finger was white and bloodless.

  ‘Yes!’ I laughed.

  He left in a breeze of fineness.

  DRAFTS

  Subject: [No subject]

  Dear Art,

  You cunt.

  Jenny

  ‘FUNNY’

  Suzy says, ‘how Art and I are both photographers.’

  ‘I take photographs, too,’ I say. ‘Recreationally. I am a recreational photographer.’

  ‘We all are, these days,’ says Suzy. ‘I’m lucky I can make 220k a year out of my humble little snaps. With the right promotional attachment.’

  My mother’s head rolls round on her neck and back again. ‘Excuse me?’ One of us says it.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Suzy. ‘It’s nuts, really.’

  My heart is crashing. My brain is crashing. Someone turn me off and on again. And then I see the opportunity. What a beautiful fiction I could cannibalise from this terrible pain … I pull my phone out. ‘Do you mind,’ I say, ‘if I get a photo of us all? I always do this when I meet interesting people. To prove I still have an interesting life. Being over thirty, I mean! Haha!’

  Art looks at me unusually. I almost can’t believe my own behaviour but I have nothing to lose now, literally nothing. I hold my phone up for the selfie. I don’t even care that I’m at the front, in potato position. This is pure gold. They are all mine now, captured in my little memory box. I move to take the shot, to seal the box.

  ‘No,’ Suzy says, ducking out of the way, ‘no, sorry. I’m quite careful about privacy. And besides, tonight’s all about the work!’

  ‘You can see it,’ I say. ‘You can authorise it.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ says Art. ‘Let’s just get to know each other, shall we? Let’s be friends first, facilitators later.’

  ‘Hahaha!’ says Suzy, relaxing.

  I put my phone back in my pocket, chastised.

  ‘I have to be extra careful because of Clemency,’ says Suzy. ‘And please don’t repeat her name elsewhere as we are keen to protect her privacy. We have an Instagram account just for her with just a picture of praying hands as the avatar. That’s all the world gets of her.’

  ‘Is Clemency a dachshund?’ I say. ‘No, don’t tell me, Italian greyhound. Did you get the dog to look like the dog? I have a theory about this.’

  Suzy is looking at me oddly. So is Art. Do I sound like a stalker? I don’t want to sound like a stalker.

  My mother says, ‘Oh.’ My mother says, ‘Ah.’ My mother says, ‘Jenny, I remember something I needed to talk to you about regarding something urgent, come with me now …’

  I brush her off. I am enjoying my wine and dog chat with Suzy B.

  ‘How’s work, Jenny?’ Art says.

  ‘Great.’

  Suzy says, ‘Art showed me a few of your articles. I particularly loved the one about being big spoon for a change.’

  ‘Thanks, yeah, they’re usually a lot more political than that.’

  ‘I love your nineties smoky make-up, by the way. I’ve been meaning to try that, but I never really wear make-up.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ says my mother. She looks at Suzy closely.

  ‘No. All au naturel! I suppose I might have to change my tune when I hit thirty-three or thirty-four. But I’m only twenty-eight, so, you know, I have time.’

  I want to say to Suzy, Let’s not do this, you and I. Let’s not be part of the deforming sexual competition.

  ‘I did Jenny’s make-up,’ my mother says. I want to throttle her. ‘We’re all in the creative industries. It’s a lot of maintenance.’

  Suzy says: ‘We are all about natural beauty here at the show.’

  ‘Nature is not beautiful,’ says my mother. ‘Nature is the ugliest thing of all. Mother Nature is a misogynistic bitch. You just have to look at childbirth to know that.’

  ‘I’m very interested in this,’ Art says. ‘Tell me more, Carmen.’

  Suzy laughs again, more of a titter. I do what I think is a silent impression of her but it actually comes out as a squeak. I cover my
mouth and pretend it was the beginning of a strange cough. My mother tries to catch my eye but I expertly avoid her. I down the rest of my wine and take another from a passing tray.

  ‘Art tells me you’re a psychic-medium,’ says Suzy, to my mother.

  ‘I used to be an actress,’ my mother says. ‘I have trodden the boards.’

  Suzy smiles politely.

  ‘Now she just goes for the board of producers,’ I say.

  Suzy roars. Like the lion of Great Britain. Like one of those big ones, by the Thames. ‘You’re so funny!’ says Suzy. ‘Just like Art said! So delightfully capricious and contradictory.’

  I make a laugh-shape with my mouth, but I am stricken. Is this what I have become: an anecdote he recounts in bed – something that they can both titter about? I am not that small or tragic. Am I? This is the version of me that Art wants me to be – and she does too, on some level. They both want me to fade into a safe, defined dot, receding into nothing on the road behind them. So they can look back and go – Is that …? Ah. No. It’s just a speck of dust on the lens.

  I look at Suzy – at her bird-like face and scrupulous restraint. The water in Suzy’s inner bowl is a millpond.

  I have almost finished my second glass of wine. At the bottom of the glass is freedom.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Art says. ‘We must make a plan to give you back your cups and saucers.’

  I frown.

  ‘So adorbs!’ says Suzy.

  They both look at me, like I am an enchanting dog. ‘Jenny used to throw these wonderful parties.’

  ‘You said,’ says Suzy, still smiling.

  I shrug. ‘It was just some mulled wine and hot punch. Look, I really don’t want them back. Just give them back to charity.’

  Art opens his mouth to speak but then a little girl runs up to us. I look at her, this lost child. She stares at Suzy. ‘Mummy, I need the toilet.’

  Suzy reaches for her bag. I look back to the little girl, and see she has the same haircut, the same face.